The Essences of Fraudulence

In the Senates rush to pass their version of healthcare “reform” next week any shady dodge will do. And with the Better Care Reconciliation Act, or BCRA, their plan is simple; lie, misrepresent what they are doing, when confronted, misdirect and lie some more. Because they are convinced they have found a loophole to exploit, one where any evaluation of their plan, ahem score will do.

By maneuvering the fate of deciding what “qualifies” as a score under Budget Act into the hands of Mike Enzi, chair of Senate Budget Committee, Senate leaders have pulled off a particularly convenient sleight of procedural hands since Enzi’s the guy who originated this bill.

Not to mention that Senate Republicans are “considering” an alternative scoring method, using the Department of Health and Human Services to “score it. What they neglected to mention about their “idea,” it’s that the HHS is controlled by the GOP, and their “numbers” will be cooked, partisan and fraudulent unlike the independent CBO.

Of course that has nothing to do with the fact that Senate leaders are trying to rush this bill through with as little debate as humanly possible, knowing full well that the HHS score can be done in just a few days, and on the cheap, while the CBO’s score will take several weeks.

And as tragic as it would be for Senate Republicans to have to listen to their constituents about healthcare, or wait to hold a more informed vote, it should be clear that barring massive resistance from a few holdouts, there will be a vote on BCRA before the CBO score comes out, and it will likely happen next week.

Killing the ACA is one of the lynchpins of the Republican fraudulent scheme, one that is based on a commitment to relocating wealth upwards and rendering government agencies impotent. In the case of health care, the “savings” from cutting programs like Medicaid will be effectively transferred to the ultra wealthy in the form of massive and unnecessary tax cuts.

What better way to assure that government agencies remain ineffective than to populate them with people who are ideologically opposed to their very existence, and then pretend that nothing like this is happening? And this is just the beginning, after they’ve killed health care, they will move like a swarm of lemmings headed for the cliff, passing another fatally flawed Federal budget.

Actions which are intended to starve the beast and drown it in bathtub as it were. Unfortunately, they’ve grown so dependent kicking the fiscal can down the road in past budgets that even this budgetary sleight of hand is no longer what it used to be.

When they finally turn to privatizing highways, bridges and federal lands, it won’t take it long for it to become an unaccountable financial morass as far as the eye can see. Or to surpass the infamous “collation of the billing,” a cartel of contractors who freely looted government coffers under Bush’s provisional government in Iraq.

And in a related display of arrogance and chutzpah, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his cronies reinserted a provision back into this “amended” bill after it was exposed as being too atrocious. How heinous was it you ask? Congress and congressional employees would be exempted from Trumpcare.

Perhaps the New York Times was being too kind in outlining the cruelty and fraudulence of this bill, but they definitely got the part about the Republican’s extra helping of stealth right.

So if you don’t want to see this bill pass and watch the all progress made under ACA, and Medicaid be relegated to the trash pile, make it your business to contact your State Senator, along with these Republican holdouts:

This list promises to become even smaller the further we get into next week. Whether Senator McCain will go out in his last term as a maverick remains to be seen, as well how many Senators will hold out for some pork to sway their vote, and possibly their conscience.